A New Reading of Abstraction in Turkmen Art – Gallery Nadar, French Institute in Turkmenistan
December 2025 – March 2026
Everyday from 9am to 8pm, free entry
The French Institute in Turkmenistan, in partnership with Art Nokady and artfool.ca, presents AT33T* (Turkmen Abstractions in 33 Paintings), an exhibition featuring 33 abstract works from the artfool.ca collection and several private collections.
Although abstraction has never formed a clearly defined chapter in Turkmen art, many artists have, at various moments, stepped away from representation to explore form, colour, rhythm, and intuition. This exhibition places these individual explorations side by side, revealing unexpected echoes across generations.
Among the featured artists, Nini holds a distinctive place. Trained in France and currently continuing her studies in Switzerland, she has developed a personal approach to gestural, freely constructed abstraction. Her paintings emerge through movement—layered strokes, intersecting lines, and fluid, impulsive gestures that create a sense of composition unfolding in real time. While her work resonates with the post-war European tradition of gestural abstraction, it remains entirely her own in tone and expression.
The exhibition also highlights contemporary painters such as Dilaram Hojainowa, Vitaly Didenko, Nazar Bekmuradov, and Mammet Yurmamedov, each pursuing abstraction through their own sensibilities: subtle geometry, playful distortion, concentrated colour, or carefully measured spontaneity.
They are presented alongside renowned masters of Turkmen modern art, including Tokar Tugurov, Chary Amangeldiyev, and Juma Aman Durdy. At certain stages in their careers, these artists also turned toward abstraction, experimenting with geometric tension, atmospheric fields, or pared-down forms—works born from curiosity rather than allegiance to a specific movement.
Throughout the exhibition, gentle resonances appear: Mondrian’s balanced clarity, Kandinsky’s early idea of colour as a living force, and the rhythmic discipline familiar from Turkmen ornamental thinking—felt not as motif, but as an instinctive way of composing space. Yet each painting ultimately stands on its own, shaped more by sensitivity than theory.
AT33T* does not propose a school or lineage. Instead, it brings together artists who, at different times and for different reasons, allowed their work to drift into abstraction. Their paintings do not share a single direction, yet together they form a vivid conversation—between masters and contemporaries, between Turkmenistan and France, and between the seen and the imagined. /// French Institute in Turkmenistan